When I was a boy I attended a small Methodist church a few minutes from our home in Pennsylvania. I can remember attending a Good Friday service one year. I was probably seven or eight years old. People looked somber. The atmosphere was sad and very quiet. The pastor talked about Jesus’ suffering and dying. Although I was just a little boy, I had a basic understanding of what was transpiring. However, what I remember thinking to myself over and over that day was, “Why do we call this Good Friday? What’s so good about it?”
Well, I suppose it doesn’t take too much thought to make sense of it. What’s good about it is not the excruciating suffering that Jesus endured, but rather that He did it for us, in our place, for the salvation of all who believe in Him. I think 2 Corinthians 5:21 sums it up really well: “God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.” So as contradictory as it might seem, Good Friday is a somber day, yet a good day for those who believe in Christ Jesus.
When I reflect on Easter, I tend to go right to the end of each of the four gospels. After all, that is where the Passion story is recorded. But as the above-quoted verse reveals, the Passion story, and the interpretation thereof, appears all throughout Scripture. In fact, I’d like to sign off today by merely re-printing a passage that, when I think about it, ought to be required reading for all of us on Good Friday. It is Isaiah 53. To me, what is so absolutely stunning about this chapter of the Bible is that it was written about 700 years before Jesus lived, yet it depicts a man who:
(a) Was rejected and despised by men, and suffered and died;
(b) Had himself done nothing wrong;
(c) Died for our transgressions, because we are all sinners;
(d) Although dead, would somehow live again;
(e) Would be given some exalted position by God; and
(f) Will make intercession on our behalf so that we can be justified
Sounds a lot like the gospel, doesn’t it? Is it any wonder that Isaiah is sometimes referred to as “the fifth gospel?”
Here’s wishing you all a very Happy Easter.
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Isaiah 53
1 Who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
2 He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
3 He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
4 Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.
6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
7 He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.
8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away. And who can speak of his descendants? For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was stricken.
9 He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.
10 Yet it was the Lord's will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the Lord makes his life a guilt offering, he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.
11 After the suffering of his soul, he will see the light of life and be satisfied; by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities.
12 Therefore I will give him a portion among the great, and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors. For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.
Why is it that the Christmas season lasts for a month, but the Easter season lasts only for a week or two at most? As I opined in my last blog entry, isn’t Easter the more significant holiday? Isn’t the death and resurrection of Jesus the most important event in Christianity, even in world history?
I was therefore ready to rant that the Easter season ought to be beefed up to reflect its relative importance. Let’s expand the focus on Easter as it approaches, maybe emphasize it for three or four weeks. Let’s make a bigger deal out of Palm Sunday. Let’s press for a national holiday coincident with Easter (I’ve always wondered why, with all of the holidays we have, and with all of the reasons for them, we do not have a national holiday on Good Friday or Easter Monday).
But as I progressed down this mental path, two significant roadblocks presented themselves. Maybe they are both obvious. The first is that, in our culture, an expansion of the Easter season would only mean an expansion of “commercial Easter”—more time for the Easter Bunny to appear at the mall, more time for Easter egg hunts, more time to sell chocolate eggs and bunnies in their pastel-colored wrappers, and more time to invent new traditions that have nothing to do with the death and resurrection of our Savior.
The second roadblock to the need to expand Easter is more significant, in my estimation. If you go to church at least semi-regularly, you have no doubt heard the reason before. That is, as Christians, the whole reason we worship on Sundays in the first place is to remember the resurrection of Jesus. We are to be celebrating Easter every week!
All four gospel accounts say that Jesus’ resurrection happened on the first day of the week (the day after the Sabbath). Later, during the time of the early church, Christians began the practice of meeting together on the first day of the week to commemorate the resurrection. This came to be known as “the Lord’s Day.” In 1 Corinthians 16:2, Paul gives instructions as to what the believers in Corinth should do on the “first day of the week,” implying that they gathered together on that day. In Revelation 1:10, John’s vision is given to him on “the Lord’s Day.” This practice of Christians gathering for worship on “the first day of the week” or “the Lord’s Day” is also found in other writings of the first and second century, and obviously continues to today.
The commercialization of Easter, like that of Christmas, is silly and is certainly deserving of light-hearted chiding. (For instance, how do you explain the association of the Easter bunny, who is a rabbit, with eggs? I don’t get it.) But I’m thankful that instead of meandering off on that tangent, I was instead reminded of how all of us ought to be viewing worship services each and every Sunday. It is the Lord’s Day, and we go to church every Sunday to celebrate Easter—the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Yesterday was Palm Sunday, and the Easter season is upon us. It comes and goes pretty quickly, doesn’t it? Whereas in December, when we spend about a month gearing up for and celebrating Christmas (the birth of the Savior, or at least that’s what we’re supposed to be celebrating), Easter time is comparatively short. What’s more, Easter coincides with Spring Break at school and the NCAA basketball tournament, so perhaps it is easy to get distracted.
But when you think about it, from a Christian perspective, Easter is the most important holiday of the year. The birth of Jesus—that is, the incarnation of God Himself into human form—is remarkable and certainly warrants its due at Christmas, but Easter marks the event that in a sense defines Christianity itself. Without too much exaggeration, the resurrection of Jesus can be called the single most significant event in history, in that it validates the claims, teachings, and predictions of Jesus. Chief among these claims is that He is God’s Son, and that eternal life rests in us believing in Him.
I have determined this Easter to read and contemplate the Passion narratives in the Bible. When I have done this in the past, one thing that has always struck me is that the story contains details that I think we sometimes overlook. At least I do. Maybe I’m reading so fast that I mentally skip over phrases or sentences that are packed with significance. One example is the simple sentence “Then Pilate took Jesus and had Him flogged” (John 19:1). This snippet appears in the other gospel accounts as well. I’ll tell you, there have been times when I have been three or four verses down the road when I stopped and said to myself, “Whoa, wait a second. Did that just say that Jesus was flogged?” Without getting into all the gory details, flogging was an intensely brutal practice. By flying right by this short verse, I think we can miss the significance of how much Jesus suffered on our behalf.
Here’s another example of what I mean. It appears in the last part of John 19:15, which says:
“Shall I crucify your king?” Pilate asked.
“We have no king but Caesar,” the chief priests answered.
Again, in the past I have blown right by this verse without giving it too much thought. But as I contemplate it now, I find the reply of the chief priests to be shocking. The chief priests were the Jewish religious leaders of the day. And remember, they were trying to kill Jesus because of blasphemy—Jesus was claiming to be a king, claiming to have the rights and qualities of God. In other words, in the eyes of the chief priests, Jesus was claiming equality with Yahweh, the Creator God of Israel from the Old Testament. That God was the true king. Yet what did the chief priests say to Pontius Pilate? They said, “We have no king but Caesar.”
Let me express it this way. One might have expected the chief priests to say something like, “You know, this guy is claiming to be God, and as you are aware, Mr. Pilate, our ancient Scriptures tell us that the God of Israel is the one true God, the one we are supposed to love with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. God is our king, not this guy.” But instead they denied their God altogether, and swore allegiance to Caesar. Caesar! The unclean, Gentile, secular overlord of captive Israel! Wow. Now, I am aware that the Jewish leadership had in many ways strayed from their responsibilities of being the guardians of the Jewish belief in Yahweh. Yet when I ponder the chief priests’ cold, public denial of their God, and enthusiastic declaration of allegiance to Caesar, I find it shocking.
Much is made of the story of Peter’s denial of Jesus during the Passion story, and rightly so. Much can be learned from it. But much can be learned from the chief priests as well. You see, the chief priests were supposed to be the “guardians of the truth,” the ones pointing others to God, but instead they had devolved largely into advocates of rote tradition and religious rules. In doing so, they had actually fallen far away from God, as witnessed by their response to Pontius Pilate. Men who purportedly viewed God as the only king actually said, “We have no king but Caesar.”
Can harboring such an attitude happen to Christians today? Sadly, I believe it can and does. One of my prayers this Easter season is that I would not slip into habits of practicing religious rules and traditions, but rather that I would understand, acknowledge, and proclaim who God really is—and what He did by sending His own Son to earth. His Son, King Jesus.
When I was a boy I attended a small Methodist church a few minutes from our home in Pennsylvania. I can remember attending a Good Friday service one year. I was probably seven or eight years old. People looked somber. The atmosphere was sad and very quiet. The pastor talked about Jesus’ suffering and dying. Although I was just a little boy, I had a basic understanding of what was transpiring. However, what I remember thinking to myself over and over that day was, “Why do we call this Good Friday? What’s so good about it?”
